bits and pieces.

Archive for the 'News' Category

GoDaddy.com – a great little domain name registrar, despite it’s many levels of come-on deals you have to bypass to get your $8.95 name – decided to push the now conservative envelope on Super Bowl Advertisements. It featured an actress in a spaghetti strap top in front a pretend congressional committee (see the ad here). […]

There is great pressure from local governments to tax internet connection services. Several states already tax broadband and/or DSL connection services. A prior ban on such taxes lapsed at the end of November, but President Bush last Friday signed a bill to extent that exemption from local taxation. They allowed states already charging a broadband […]

This article from InternetNews.com points out an attempt by an advertiser to get regular references to their product/site from regular high traffic bloggers. Unless it is a clearly disclosed situation, I would be offended to find a post I am reading turns out to be a paid ad. The company says that the blogger can […]

For just $30 a year for a consumer, or $600 a year for commercial users, you can use Keyhole, an interactive mapping solution that gives you zoomable high definition images of the earth. I can see where a realtor for example, may benefit from being able to show a site to a prospective buyer. I […]

The recording industry, encouraged by favorable treatment from the most liberal federal bench in the US Appeals system, has filed a petition with the US Supreme Court, seeking to hold file sharing software companies responsible for the sharing done by clients of the company. Among Monday’s petitioners siding with the entertainment companies were the Association […]

A fascinating article on the use of WiFi networks to relay messages via remote control cameras in high crime neighborhoods. New Orleans reports significant drops in crime. Of course then the question is how much standard monitoring do we as a free society tolerate? Do we have an expectation of privacy when we look around […]

Corel Software today (October 14th, 2004) announced the purchase of Jasc, the company that produces the popular Paint Shop Pro program. Hopefully it will lead to more widespread use of the program and will not lead to increased costs for this fine program.

“Maxthon is a powerful web browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer engine (your most likely current web browser) which means that what works in IE, works the same in Maxthon but with many additional efficient features … ” Interesting to me, after reading one of Franki’s posts on […]

Tivo to Go won approval today by the FCC. It will allow you to send a recorded TiVo show to your laptop and take it with you. The NFL is concerned it will be used to bypass blackout restrictions on games. Of course, anyone who really wanted to do that could probably figure out a […]

Wall Street Journal RSS Feed Information is available. RSS isn’t just for the little guys any more. First exploding (in my opinion) in blogs and smaller places, the big boys are now coming on board with RSS feeds, further validating the concept has long term viability. This page also is good because it explains in […]

J.K.Rowling Official Site – Harry Potter is now up and running. I read all the Potter books for some light entertainment when my kids had them around. They are entertaining, although they get repetitive about now. I am not much of a flash fan, and yet, this is a very neat site. It requires that […]

Just a quick note to wish all in the US a happy 4th of July, but remember, celebrate safely! Injuries from Fireworks – NCIPC Tells about injuries from fireworks. As a “survivor” of a pretty good hand blow up in my youth, I can tell you it ain’t pretty. So have fun, but be safe. […]

gMail is a new concept from Google to provide huge email boxes to people for “free”. Their machines scan the mail content and then provide clearly marked advertisements that appear to be topical in the margin. Welcome Page for gMail. Currently the only way to get one is to be invited by Google. After the […]

Totally unreleated to anything web design. (sorry) but I found this so interesting, that I had to share. Apparently numerous signs of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) have been found in Iraq, but because there was no huge stockpile found (a figurative smoking gun), the worlds media have mostly ignored it. Where as the report […]

This new link is for those times when you really need to come up with a fresh new page design, and you just can’t seem to come up with anything you like. Lose that stress immediately. I could use that for hours.. I am thinking of making it my home page. rgds Franki

While doing my weekly check of securityfocus.com for news of any new vunerabilities, I came across this excellent article on Web application security: Securing web applications (session management). I’m paranoid as anyone that knows me is aware of.. so this sort of thing really appeals to me.. The session management of both the downloader and […]

In 2002, a company that has the patent on the JPG technology started enforcing their patent. They did so after waiting till JPG had become the industry standard and up till that point had kept quiet about it to make sure the prospect of patent enforcement did not hamper its uptake.. Once JPG reached maximium […]

Recently Google have created a new webmail service that looks likely to make both yahoo and MSN hotmail look really lame by comparision. For one thing you get a massive 1 gig of data storage for free, when both yahoo and hotmail charge you around $50 a year to give you just 100mb, (and only […]

Update at Microsoft once again unless you like living dangerously! Microsoft this week released what has been called a “flurry of critical updates” due to vulnerabilities that could be exploited. You will need to use your Microsoft Internet Explorer to update, even though by now you likely use Firefox as your standard browser if you […]

Well we’ve gone and done it now! For months, we have been manually adding news to the front page of our site (not to be confused under any stretch of anyone’s imagination with the program FrontPage — that we don’t use … ever). Ironically for months we have likewise (that means Don … while Franki […]

We have added another user contributed tutorial to htmlfixit.com: Using Microsoft Proprietary Tags to Beat the Broken Box Model The author, Chris Najman runs a London-based, accessible web design company called Najman Web. His site can be found at www.najmanweb.com. He discussed the box model hack avoidance technique of just using Microsoft’s proprietary tags. We […]

I’ve been reading allot recently on the SCO/IBM legal debate about whether IBM is responsible for putting SCO proprietary code into Linux. (I should add that it hasn’t been proven yet that any proprietary code has been included in Linux because any time SCO reveal something they claim as illegal code, its found to have […]

We’ve started working on the advanced downloader script now.. As well as all the features of the free versions , it will support multiple download locations and will also work as a link tracker as well. (thats the plan anyway). I’d also like to see it able to work with the IPN script to provide […]

I have posted a new “tutorial” although it is really just an accumulations of findings I had in trying to solve the broken box model in Internet Explorer 5. This results in problems for css layout sites when viewed in IE5 unless some adjustment is made. In this article, The Box Model Hack and other […]

Well Franki and I (“I” because I throw in sarcastic comments during development in order to claim a contribution) have added a couple of more primers to the successful series on the htmlfixit.com site: # Perl Primer 013 Advanced data constructs An array of hashes Here we take a brief look at creating and using […]

We offer many free scripts for download on our site. Our downloader script that we offer to you is also used on our site and it logs how many of each file offered are downloaded. We thought people might find it useful to see which ones are most popular at any given time. Top Ten […]

Well this is it! We have been messing up under this domain name for exactly one year today. So thanks for visiting our creation. In that time we have formed our sister operation, littlehosting, that offers full service web site hosting for reasonable cost — where we don’t nickle and dime the customer like other […]

Not much new to report at this time, but a couple of warnings: Firstly, there are a couple of nasty virus’s around at the moment, including but not limited to the widespread mydoom.A virus. Our mail server has filtered out thousands of mydoom virus emails in the past month. So if you use any version […]

Well, we are back on the job (not that we ever left, but effective again anyway), making some changes and additions to the site. The most noticable is a new look in the banner, but lots is going on around the site. I’m working hard to get the PayPal IPN Perl script I’ve written ready […]

Now days, many of us have joined the mobile brigade and now work from laptops, recently it came to my attention that many laptop owners were feeling left out in that they can’t upgrade the video card of their laptops like our desktop brothers and sisters have been doing for years. There is no longer […]